Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2001 02:38:45 -0500
From: lynne engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: BHA: negativity wins


James,

Thanks very much for your post which I read with great interest.  Brief
comments --

On communism as the unifying truth of both materialism and idealism --
Theses on Feuerbach illustrates this.  Marx insists on a materialism that
absorbs the negative.

On Aristotle and Marx, listers may also want to know about Jonathan Pike's
relatively recent book called From Aristotle to Marx: Aristotelianism in
Marx's Social Ontology.  From your post, 

>the true solution to that Humean empiricist
>>pseudo-problem lies in the concept of the "nature" or essence of a thing,
>>its idea -- which points to its ideal, the fulfilment of its *telos* --

wouldn't both Aristotle and Marx's ontological emphasis on form capture
this idea more fully, ie that the nature or essence of a thing is its form
which is the principle of its self-development?

Howard



At 06:36 PM 3/4/01 -0000, you wrote:
>
>james daly
>james.daly-AT-ntlworld.com
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Douglas Porpora" <porporad-AT-drexel.edu>
>To: <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
>Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2001 3:25 PM
>Subject: Re: BHA: negativity wins
>>
>> While I'm here, I wonder, James, if you could elaborate on the
>> falsity of the distinction between deontology and. . .sorry, it's on
>> my home computer. . .was it consequentialist ethics?
>>
>> doug
>> --
>> doug porpora, head
>> Department of Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology
>> Drexel University
>> Phila PA
>> (215) 895-2404
>>
>> porporad-AT-drexel.edu
>
>Hi Doug
>
>Sorry for the delay.  I came to the Bergsonian theme of the rejection of the
>polar opposites materialism and idealism via Merleau-Ponty's version of
>phenomenology.  It was reinforced by Lukcs's condemnation of the "bourgeois
>(Cartesian) antinomies", which I first came across in Goldmann's "Hidden
>God", where he applied it to Kant's divorce of happiness and virtue. (Marx
>in the early writings says "Communism as humanism is naturalism, and as
>naturalism is humanism... It is neither idealism nor materialism, but the
>unifying truth of both"). The Kantian Prichard called Socratic/platonic
>eudaimonism "a mistake", because it linked morality to happiness (understood
>in a Puritan way as pleasure) (teleology) instead of to duty (Kant's one and
>only "Virtue", as MacIntyre pointed out) (deontology).  I believe their
>natural law tradition pre-dates any such divorce, and dialectically unifies
>nature and right reason, good as fulfilment of natural potentiality, right,
>law, rights, virtue (excellence, arete), happiness as pleasure in virtue
>etc.  ...
>
>Hi Ruth
>to
>I see CR and DCR as a seamless web, and as liberation from the empiricism,
>scepticism and relativism of the bourgeois arch-enemy Hume....
>
>Hi Mervyn
>
>I like your point about the double meaning of *dein*.  It reinforces
>etymologically my point above (to Doug) that eudaimonism unifies teleology
>and deontology; the fulfilment of our need (necessitousness) lies in
>unconditional moral necessity.  But what about the hyphen in de-ont?
>
>By the way, I don't think eudaimonism is a consequentialism. The
>consequences of an action play a part in moral judgement, but
>Consequentialism as a theory is a cancerous growth of that part.  The
>unfortunately both right-wing and Humean John Finnis is good on this
>in*Fundamentals of Ethics*....
>
>Hi Gary
>
>Could you please send me your personal e-mail address?
>
>To all
>
>Further to the above, I hope I'll be forgiven for posting an edited version
>of something I posted on another list.
>
>
>
>The Austro-Marxists disastrously and incorrectly interpreted Marx's thought
>as a (Kautskyan, Plekhanovite) mechanistic science after the bourgeois
>positivist and Neo-Kantian model, and accepted the ultraliberal Max Weber's
>dictat (directed against socialist economists) that science must be
>value-free, and totally divorced from politics (i.e. ... it must be
>liberal). Obligingly, they explicitly denied that there were any values in
>Marxism, and were then left looking around for a theoretical justification
>for their politics, which they improbably sought for in the individualist
>ethics of Kant.
>
>As Allen Wood has recognised, Marx did not believe science was value-free.
>But although Wood was one of the first to recognise the Aristotelian
>dimension in Marx, nevertheless, with his theory that Marx is "immoralist",
>Wood does not see that Marx had -- like Hegel -- an Aristotelian approach to
>human values, seeing the natural human goal as the development of the human
>potentiality. Therefore to a great extent the quarter century of empiricist
>debate, magisterially summarised and in some regards concluded by Norman
>Geras in *New Left Review*, over (what I now consider to be) Wood's
>outlandish theory, has been a wild goose chase. But that is also because
>Marx's view of human nature was not only Aristotelian, explicitly (against
>the social contract theories or "Robinson(Crusoe)ades" of Hobbes, Locke and
>Rousseau -- and by implication Rawls) endorsing Aristotle's view of human
>nature as naturally political; it was also Feuerbachian -- endorsing
>Feuerbach's humanism, his view of human nature as naturally communal. One of
>the most important things Marx wrote was the Feuerbachian "Supposing we had
>produced in a human manner: I would have realised that I am confirmed both
>in your thought and in your love" (Notes on James Mill, in Penguin *Early
>Writings*, p 278). That expressed his basic value, and what he also believed
>was the basic value of the proletariat, which he called the "universal
>class", because of its position in history as the last class, the class of
>direct producers which had no other class to exploit. (In his last years he
>was considering whether the Russian rural commune could fulfill the same
>role). Someone who has appreciated the significance of this for Marx (and of
>its loss and denial in the alienation which is the bourgeois mode of
>production) is Erich Fromm (e.g. in *Marx's Concept of Man*).
>
>Roy Bhaskar's realist theory of science devastatingly criticises the
>empiricist and positivist model which was popularised by Karl Popper. I
>think his theory fits with the Aristotelian element (the discovery of the
>essence behind the appearance) which is finally being discovered in Marx:
>see Scott Meikle, *Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx*; also George
>McCarthy editor, *Marx and Aristotle*. Marx avoided what Lukcs called "the
>bourgeois antinomies", the Cartesian dichotomy between mind and nature,
>which leads to the gross materialism of utilitarianism and the abstract
>legalism of Kant, and in general to the false dichotomy between fact and
>value, is and ought; the true solution to that Humean empiricist
>pseudo-problem lies in the concept of the "nature" or essence of a thing,
>its idea -- which points to its ideal, the fulfilment of its *telos*.
>
>Hume's "guillotine", his saying that there is no logical basis for an
>"ought" (value) statement from "is" (factual) statements, is pseudo-logic
>(since every statement in the Aristotelian syllogisms Hume was thinking of
>is an "is" statement), but more importantly it stems from his empiricism
>which as Roy Bhaskar has pointed out is closely connected to mechanism and
>value-free science.  That opens the door to the stagism and immoralism of
>"Marxist" materialism (very different from Marx's humanism and
>*naturalism*).  In response to irrationalist emotivism (leading to A. J.
>Ayer's Logical Positivist "Ethics is non-sense") and to the hedonistic
>utilitarianism closely connected to it(for instance in Hume) Kant retreated
>to a noumenal world and a logicist concept of reason; the categorical
>imperative is not to contradict oneself.  These are the polar opposite
>materialism and idealism of the Cartesian dichotomy of mind and body.  One
>beauty of the Aristotelian dimension in Marx is that it avoids that
>dichotomy.  Aristotle had a unified conception of the human rational
>organism. Gestalt psychology (which derives from Husserl's anti-Humean
>method in philosophy, which he called Phenomenology) recovers many
>Aristotelian insights, opening the way to incorporating human values into
>science in the way Marx did -- in terms of the fulfilment of human beings,
>of their nature, their intrinsic human telos -- somewhat in the way it does
>in the science of medicine.
>
>Thanks to John Landon. I should like to reply to some of his many points.
>
>"Are you referring to the early Marx?" No: Aristotelian and Feuerbachian
>humanism, and the alienation and fetishism which are their opposite, are
>central to Marx's thought throughout his life.
>
>"In the context of science, Aristotle is virtually the enemy".  Perhaps
>mediaeval Aristotelianism was the enemy in Galileo's day, but I think today
>the enemy is the complex of empiricism, positivism, reductionism and
>mechanism.  A realist theory of science, such as Roy Bhaskar's, which I
>think has affinities with Aristotle, may provide a better understanding even
>of Galileo's science than they do.  I am not well-informed on Darwinism, but
>is it not better understood not as reductionism but as emergentism, which
>again has affinities with Aristotle.
>
>"Kant's Third Antinomy, as to freedom and causality" arises from the
>mechanistic complex.  An Aristotelian (or a Gestalt, and emergentist)
>account of human nature does not produce that dichotomy.
>
>John refers to noumena and 'the near equivalent, "Aristotelian essence" '.
>I
>think that may be due to nominalist and empiricist preconceptions, that
>essences cannot exist because they are not observable.  Essences are
>discovered in their effects.  Saul Kripke has made essentialism respectable,
>after an age of arguments such as those about family resemblance,
>essentially contested concepts, and open textured concepts.  But the word
>"essentialism" is used in many contexts where I might (if I knew enough)
>support those who oppose it in senses different from the one I am using
>(which is that of
>Scott Meikle's *Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx*).  The word
>"teleology"is in the
>same pass: I use it in the sense of an intrinsic telos, tied up with
>concepts like need, possibility, development of potential, and function, not
>in the sense of an ulterior purpose.
>
>I have been working on this theme for some time; results can be seen in
>James Daly,* Marx: Justice and Dialectic*, London, Greenwich Exchange, 1996;
>and *Deals and Ideals: Two Concepts of Enlightenment*, London, Greenwich
>Exchange, 2000; e-mail address greenx01-AT-globalnet.com. The opening pages of
>*Deals and Ideals* can be read at the Greenwich Exchange web site
>http://www.greenex.co.uk
>
>
>A paper "Marx And The Two Enlightenments" contributed to the Twentieth World
>Congress of Philosophy in Boston, August 1998 can be seen at
>http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Poli/PoliDaly.htm A paper "Relativism,
>Universality, Natural Law and Marx" contributed to a (Bhaskarian) Critical
>Realism conference in Orebro University, Sweden, 1999 can be seen at
>http://www.oru.se/org/inst/sam/sociolog/ccr/papers/JamesDaly.rtf
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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